Debian + Backports is Better than the Latest Ubuntu

Debian Stable has a bad reputation of being little obsolete. It's never able to catch up with time. For example, at the time of writing this post, Debian 5.0.4, Lenny is still sticking to the old Iceweasel 3, OpenOffice 2.4, 2.6.26 kernel line and some other vital packages, whereas the package versions are greatly updated in the so called popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse. Some critics even say that this late-to-party nature of Debian is the reason for Ubuntu to show up in the Linux crowd.

But I don't buy to the view that Debian Stable is outdated. If you are running a server this much older packages and slow updates are a blessing. Moreover, you can catchup to the latest and greatest packages even on desktop. All you need is to add debian-backports to your /etc/apt/sources.list.